Road to Mac OS X Leopard: an extensive look at Preview 4.0

Apple in a matter of weeks will roll out Preview 4.0 as part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, a significant update to its homebred media viewer that will see the application expand from a simple PDF reader into the beginnings of a full-fledged image editor. Here's an extensive look at what's new in Preview.

Prior to Mac OS X, Apple had bundled Adobe's free Acrobat PDF Reader with new Macs. However, Adobe's laggard support for Mac OS X combined with Apple's use of PDF as the display model for its Quartz graphics layer meant that Mac OS X ended up with its own Apple-branded PDF reader. As it turned out, Preview was far faster than Adobe's Reader, in part because it doesn't load up scores of seldom used feature plugins at launch, but also because it takes full advantage of the native PDF rendering features built into Mac OS X's graphics engine.

Hidden Tiger Preview Features

In the currently shipping versions of Mac OS X, Preview is primarily used to view PDF renderings of documents aimed at a printer, or as a way to view incoming Faxes or screenshots captured to the desktop using Apple+shift+control+4. However, Preview already does more than that. It also serves as a simple tool for cropping, rotating, and resizing graphics, as well as a graphic exchange tool that can convert between any of the variety of graphic file types supported by QuickTime codecs, including GIF, JPEG, PNG, PICT, Photoshop PSD, TGA, TIFF, and Windows BMP.

Because Preview launches almost instantaneously, it also works well as a general graphics viewer. It even offers some basic image correction tools, including saturation, contrast, exposure, and sharpness sliders. If you draw a blank about how to perform a full screen slideshow for a selection of photos or graphics, open Preview and select Slideshow from the View menu. If you find yourself unable to remember the magic key combinations used to trigger a screen capture, you can fire up Preview and select Grab from the File menu, which presents the options to grab a selection, a window, or a timed shot of the screen.

As Preview adds on features that expand beyond simply viewing print previews, it edges closer to becoming a full-fledged image editor. As is commonly the case with Apple products, as it gets closer to perfection it becomes easier to criticize for not fulfilling every imaginable desire.

New Preview Features in Leopard

As Preview's new graphics editing features fill out in Leopard, it almost becomes frustrating that the free little app isn't a full blown Photoshop. Preview also handles PDF editing features, which will no doubt irritate some for not matching every detail of Adobe's full price Acrobat Professional. As a free tool of Leopard however, Preview does a lot and suggests even more in its potential. Here's what's new:

Appearance

The first obvious new feature in Preview is its refined appearance. If you hated Tiger's Mail, get ready to be incensed over Preview. It uses similarly rounded buttons to link together Toolbar icons into groups, although it follows the unified window theme applied to all Leopard applications. The result is a more professional looking application that sheds the passé stripes and bright white appearance that debuted as part of Quartz's Aqua over five years ago.

Tiger's Preview on the left compares to Leopard's revised Toolbar layouts on the right, for graphics (above) and PDFs (below).

Window Layout

In Tiger, Preview displayed multiple-page PDFs (or multiple graphics documents open at once within a single window) in a slide out drawer (below left). It turned out that drawers aren't really that great of a user interface idea. Since the original release of Aqua, drawers have been turning into sidebars like those used in iTunes and Mail. Leopard's Preview (below right) similarly ditches its drawer for a sidebar that exists as part of the window rather than a drawer sliding out the side of the main window.

Tiger's Preview window layout on the left compares to Leopard's revised Window layout on the right.

Sidebar

The new sidebar has so many new functions it needs its own bullet point. By default, it displays thumbnails of each page of the PDF, just as the old drawer did. However, the sidebar width can be manually set to any width, and as it get wider, it accommodates multiple rows of thumbnails. A zoom slider adjusts the size of the thumbnails, allowing infinite control of how the window displays the document you're viewing. Thumbnails also support drag and drop reordering of pages within a PDF, and you can delete pages or insert new blank pages.

Search

In addition, the sidebar can also be used to view a PDF's table of contents, or a listing of annotations and hyperlinks within the document, or a listing of search results. Perform a query from the Toolbar search field, and the sidebar presents search results; a checkbox allows you to group your results by page hits (relevancy), or as a simple list all the matches.

It turned out that drawers aren't really that great of a user interface idea.

Says who? I agree it doesn't make sense in a media player or mail app, where you almost certainly want what's in the sidebar there all or most of the time, but it was perfect in Preview. The drawer is there only when you have multiple images open or a PDF with multiple pages, or you want to see search results. It doesn't force the content part of the window to resize. *And*, the concave spaces it creates above and below the drawer means less of the desktop is taken up needlessly by blank toolbar space that serves no purpose. I often position files or other windows I'm using so that they're accessible from that space, so I don't have to go into Exposť. I don't understand why Leopard is going backward, squaring things off like it's the late 90s all over again, making them less flexible...

Thanks for the great review of Preview ;-). Look's really good.
Exactly the tools people need. I sometimes get 5 MB BMP screenshots from clients annotated with MS Paint for Windows. Seems like the Apple engineers got these too...

I also never ever like drawers. Just another item that you need to fiddle with.
Push it in or pull it out, it never seems to fit right. Plus it looks ugly.

Is it possible with Preview 4.0 to delete and extract pages from an existing PDF document?

Yes.

On another note, Apple is showing off two tools that put Adobe Photoshop's equivalents to shame. Ok...to be fair, I haven't used CS3 extensively so maybe I'm wrong but I don't remember ever seeing a live feedback alpha tool in Photoshop. All I remember is trial and error tolerance adjustments with the magic wand.

I am NOT saying that Preview is a Photoshop replacement. I'm saying that a limited set of tools are easier to use than in Photoshop (again, someone correct me if CS3 has some similar live feedback color/background removal tool.)

Unfortunately for Adobe, Photoshop is only for image compositors now. Everyone that has ever used Photoshop for color correction, background removal, basic touchups or image filters, can get free apps for color correction and background removal or something like Acorn or Pixelmator for basic touchups and image filters. Adobe's market has probably shrank a lot in the past couple years as the number of apps that can do basic to midrange Photoshop operations increases.

Adobe isn't improving Photoshop fast enough. It won't be long before Apple makes more image editing tools accessible via a framework. Image editing apps will flood the scene because everyone will be able to build one fairly fast.

Adobe had better have some aces up its sleeve. These 2 tools are going to go public with Leopard but who knows what other tools Apple is working on. Heck, I've said it once and I'll say it again...Apple's probably working on an image editing/compositor app. It probably won't see the light of day anytime soon but the tools will probably trickle down slowly and catch Adobe with its pants down one day.

drawers were kinda cool in the beginning, just because they looked a lot more sophisticated than anything similar in other OSes, but leopard appears to be all about streamlining, and the drawers are somewhat unintuitive.

i'm setting up an imac as a media server for my house, and i installed the current build of leopard on it. it's nice. i'm much more impressed with it than i was with tiger when it first came out. now that i've read this, i'm gonna jump on and pay some special attention to preview.

I'm sure one of the first things I'll do when I get Leopard is disassociate every major file type from Preview. Preview is nothing but a nuisance for people who have Acrobat Pro and Photoshop. The last thing I want is to double click a file and have preview launch it.

I won't miss drawers. I always found it awkward to handle the drawers in iCal and Preview when the windows were maximised.

If other OS X apps get the same level of improvements as Preview has Leopard is going to be very useful. I just hope it's more consistent than previous OS Xs.

Yes, drawers were always a problem. It was a neat idea but it was never well implemented and, as you point out, never worked well when windows were expanded to fit the screen screen. Each developer had a different way of dealing with the opening and closing of drawers. Some put an icon in the toolbar to open and close the toolbar. Of course nobody knew what the icon should look like so they always ended up making a clumsy, blurry icon of a window with a drawer sticking out. Some developers abused the idea and had drawers pop out of each side of the window (didn't Watson do this?)

I like drawers. You can rearrange the drawer on either side of the main area. You can size them independently of the main area without affecting it. You can hide them entirely without having to use the View menu. There's plenty of grab space on a draw to resize it.

You can't do any of those with the crappy blue Windows-like sidebars Apple are forcing on us now in every application. Shortly everything will look like iTunes. *Bleuch!*

And the Mail style icons in the toolbar are just as bad as they were in Mail, offering no visual difference between them because they're all white icons on grey pills. I just hope there is a Leopard version of UNO or Cagefighter that fixes the toolbar in Preview.